Who owns the inbox when every team can send?
Self-service email means every team can reach your contacts whenever it needs to. Nobody is deciding how much all of that adds up to and your contacts will notice before you do.
Marketing Technology and Customer Success Leader
3 min read
On this page
In most enterprise Eloqua and Marketo instances a contact sits on a lot of different teams’ lists at the same time. Product marketing, events, regional field marketing, customer success and partner marketing all have a reason to reach them and each team sends whatever makes sense for its own program.
Each of those emails is perfectly reasonable on its own. What they add up to is a different story and nobody is really responsible for that.
Every team’s email is someone else’s problem
The cost shows up in places no single team is watching. Unsubscribes get spread across email groups so no one program looks responsible. Open rates slide over a quarter rather than in a week. A customer tells their account manager they get too much email from you and the message never makes it back to marketing operations.
Every team sends a reasonable amount of email and nobody is responsible for the total.
Self-service makes this more likely if anything and I say that as someone whose company sells a self-service tool. Campaign Launchpad lets a marketer launch a campaign in Eloqua or Marketo without waiting on ops and the templates and approvals ops set up once take care of the guardrails. I would never argue for going back to the ticket queue. But the easier it is for a team to launch a campaign the more campaigns run in parallel and the less anyone sees of what else is going to the same people that week. Letting every team send is the easy part. Somebody still has to keep an eye on what it all adds up to.
Four questions that show who’s in charge
Email governance sounds like it needs a policy document and a steering committee. In practice it comes down to four questions and you can answer them in an afternoon.
Who owns how often a contact hears from you?
I don’t mean who administers the platform. I mean who decides that three emails a week is the limit and who gets to say no to a fourth. If the answer is “everyone” or “it depends on the campaign” then the real answer is nobody.
How do teams share contacts?
When two teams target the same contact in the same week who finds out and when? In a lot of instances nobody finds out until the contact does.
Is anything holding the total down?
A written guideline is not the same thing as a limit. Eloqua has no instance-wide setting that caps how many emails a contact gets so teams build their own caps and those have to be checked in every single campaign. Marketo has communication limits but an email that would go over the limit just doesn’t get sent.
Can leadership see it without asking?
If someone asks how many emails your most engaged customers got last month can you answer from a dashboard or does it take a week of exports?
Measure before you set a limit
Before anyone starts arguing about the right number find out what the number is today.
If Fatigue Analysis is turned on report unsubscribes by Fatigue Level too. If Oversaturated contacts are unsubscribing at several times the rate of Just Right contacts that’s your case for sending them less.
What good governance looks like
The teams that get this right tend to have a few things in common:
- One owner. Marketing operations or whoever runs the instance sets the limit and the order of priority once.
- One limit enforced in one place. Every campaign draws on the same count so two campaigns sending at the same time can’t both get through.
- Priorities instead of first come first served. When a contact has room for one more email the onboarding message goes out before the newsletter.
- Room for exceptions. Transactional and legally required email stays outside the limit.
- Numbers anyone can see. Team leads can check how much email shared contacts are getting without filing a request.
Where to start
Run the report first. Then get the team leads in a room, put the numbers in front of them, agree who owns the limit and decide which kinds of email matter most. Only after that is it worth deciding how to enforce it, whether that’s a native cap or an app like the Email Governor that holds every campaign to one limit.
If you want a quick read on where you stand today the email governance assessment is six questions and takes about a minute and a half.
Written by
Marketing Technology and Customer Success Leader
Penny has spent more than 15 years in B2B demand generation, including leading demand management at S&P Global where she built multi-channel programs on enterprise marketing technology. At DemandByte she helps customers connect their marketing automation, analytics and CRM so every program can be measured from first touch to revenue.
